WordPress SEO has had a lot of focus on the web the last couple of years. This because WordPress and SEO have grown a lot over the last couple of years and keep on growing. WordPress SEO is basically SEO applied to the WordPress CMS. This can be done in many different ways. Just like regular SEO application there are existing tools to be used as well as custom work to be done.
Solid Content
So where to start with WordPress SEO? Well as always we should not forget about solid content. And that content should be unique of course. So you will have to do your research. Your content should be genuinely helpful to the visitor / user. It should really make their lives easier.
Besides clear and good writing the content should be formatted properly too using
- headers,
- paragraphs,
- lists and
- nice images.
See linked blog post for more details on this.
Keywords
Keywords or longtail keywords still matter of course. This as visitors still have to be able to find you using search engines such as Google. So like for any SEO do research with tools such as Adwords Planner, manual Googling and so on. This to find out how the keywords you had in mind do well on the internet.
Backlinks
There are also great tools or holistic tools like AHrefs that will check how people link back to your content and how the competition is doing. Having sites of authority and or sites that are all about the topic you write about is really good SEO. IMWZ regularly gets request for placing links in blog posts. This can sometimes help us but will definitely help the people requesting it. And this is something you can do as well.
WordPress SEO Plugins
Fortunately there are plugins that can help you with your content and other WordPress SEO needs. The WordPress SEO and SEO Framework plugins IMWZ works with extensively. See our Yoast SEO vs SEO Framework comparison blog post where we compare the two in detail. Others we have tried in the past but as we ended up using these two we won’t mention the others as we have less experience with those. See here below some information on both and again we refer to comparison blog post for more details.
Yoast SEO
The Yoast SEO or WordPress SEO plugin is a great plugin that gives you inline tips on your content. We work with is on many of our client sites. It checks for the following:
- Passive voice which tends to make texts rather dull and distant and pushes you to be more active.
- Sentences length – too long is never good
- Stop words – never good to use too often
- Flesch Reading Ease Score
It also helps you analyse your content for your focus keyword(s) and or longtail keywords.
SEO Framework
We do work with the SEO Framework a lot as well these days. This as it is more lightweight and useful for a bit more advanced content writers and developers. On the page or list it will show you with ease whether:
- title length is correct
- description length is ok
- post is being indexed or not
- post links are being followed
- search engines are allowed to archive the post
- post is not redirecting
And there is automation as the SEO title and description are set up automatically. More on the earlier mentioned blog post.
Speed Optimization
Making your site faster is good SEO too though not all may realize this. Google counts this in just as it counts the use of SSL. And let’s face it, nobody likes a slow site. Fortunately WordPress has multiple plugins to compress images, cache pages, cache database queries and more.
For image compression we recommend Imagify and for caching we love using WP Rocket. Both are commercial plugins, but trust us, they are worth your $. They are so easy to setup and work really well.
If you need to bring it all to a higher level and are getting or expecting loads of traffic soon we recommend our WordPress Cloud Server setups with Trellis. It runs on a blazing fast LEMP stack with Fastcgi, micro caching, Memcached and much much more making allowing your site to play with the big boys out there.